No matter how much you’re told, you never know quite what to expect

I did not have the usual waking up from surgery experience this time around. First, I woke up in active pain. Unfortunately, the team that prepped me for surgery put the wrong kind of sheet on the OR bed, which meant that, when the post-op team was ready to transfer me from that bed to a regular patient bed just after surgery, they couldn’t simply lift and shift by the sheet like they normally do. Instead, they had to roll me onto one side and then the other so they could tuck the correct sheet beneath me. By the time they discovered the problem, I was super foggy but awake. As you can imagine, this was pretty darn painful, to the point I cried out, which I very rarely do. They were quick and professional and the initial shocking pain was over in seconds, but a faint ache held on till they’d given me my first post-surgery pain meds. The bigger issue was that, once they started rolling me, the retching started. This is how we learned I need much higher-dose anti-nausea meds than most people before I wake up. We did get the actual dry heaving and bile vomiting sorted out fairly quickly; I’d say I had some relief after about 15 minutes and it was pretty well over by the one-hour mark. But I stayed super nauseated most of the day. Apparently, treating that level of nausea after is harder than preventing it in the first place. On the upside, I didn’t have this issue after any other surgery because we knew how I reacted and I was medicated accordingly.

I’m not clear if they’d already moved my partner to my room before I got there or if they brought him in while I was still half out of it. I was drifting in and out, staying fuzzy when I was awake, and the nausea and heaving were pretty intense so it’s all pretty hazy. I remember him showing me the African violet he’d brought (purple is my favorite color) and setting up my phone and charger on my table – and me telling him to kiss me later so I didn’t barf on him and that’s about it.

This is one of those times when your mileage definitely will vary. Some people want their person right by their side when they’re that sick and vulnerable. Pre-surgery, yes? I wanted him there every moment and he was. And I definitely wanted to see his face afterward, however briefly or blearily. But I was so out of it and so sick and random medicos were still popping in and out doing things to me and for me. He kept having to constantly squeeze into a corner back behind me to get out of the way in what had to be the smallest room on a floor of single-bed rooms. Plus, while it was still not yet noon, we’d been up early and driven 40 minutes for a 6:30 a.m. arrival time. So, I asked him to go home for a few hours, eat, take care of our dogs, and come back after dinner.

Not gonna lie, the next few hours were a whole lot of sucky interspersed with a lot of just staring into space. My plastic surgeon checked in to see how I was doing at one point, and the notes say my oncological surgeon did too, though I don’t remember it. I did nap a little early on, but there was still a fair amount of periodic prodding and the ongoing nausea, which made sleeping hard. I was dependent on a very understaffed nursing and patient tech team and couldn’t get up on my own which meant some lengthy waits for water or ginger ale refills or bathroom trips. I decided to delay my next round of pain meds and see if I could go a bit longer than four hours. The nurse agreed (and when I later read my surgery notes and realized the resident had inadvertently marked me down as having a history of drug use, I understood why). By the five-hour mark it became clear I’d made a stupid decision, one I’m not even sure why I made, and I called the nurse. Alas, it was shift change, so it took almost another hour to get the meds and, by the time they kicked in, I had vowed to never deviate from the prescribed regime again. I never did either, all through that recovery and through all five of those that followed.

One thing I noticed almost immediately once the meds started wearing off was that, for some reason, the IV site was incredibly sore. It actually bruised like mad and it was a good three months before the spot quit aching entirely and the knot went all the way down. I’ve never known why. It was a fairly easy initial placement (for me), I’ve had IVs in the same spot before (and since), and it actually held from the time they put it in till the time they took it out before release. As we discovered later, two days is about the max before an IV blows on me and when I’m dehydrated, it can be a matter of hours.

I still wasn’t feeling great when my partner got back around 6:30. I’d only managed a couple bites of mashed potatoes when dinner came and the first great thing he did was move the tray of food from my bedside table to the deep window ledge so I couldn’t smell it so much. He also dug my toothbrush, toothpaste, and face cleanser out of my bag, then helped me get out of bed to the bathroom. I can’t even tell you how much better I felt after a little clean-up. It seemed to help settle my stomach too, which makes sense though I don’t really want to think about it in detail.

Then he helped me do my first corridor walk, a prerequisite for my being allowed to take myself to the bathroom whenever I needed to. If I’d been taller, I could theoretically have broken that rule, but the bed was awfully high and it seemed like a sensible rule anyway, so I stuck to it. He’d also brought me a granola bar from home because it sounded like something my stomach would tolerate. After a bit he headed back home and I went back to napping, feeling gradually less like hell as my stomach settled and the backlash from delaying my pain meds came under control.

About 8 pm, I decided to try getting up by myself for the first time and boy was that an adventure. We use our pecs so much more than we realize and my abs have never been my strongest area. I’m also short and, specifically, I have short legs. Plus there was that oddly painful IV. All together, it was a pretty wild combo of obstacles. That first time, it took a solid fifteen minutes of maneuvering before I accidentally kicked a bar of some kind attached to the bottom of the bed and started pondering physics. After a couple more minutes of experimentation, I realized that if I shifted just right, I could hook my foot around the bar and use my lower body strength, of which I have plenty, to augment my abs. I was so darn proud of myself once I finally got it sorted that I went to the bathroom and then went for a solo walk down the hall and then sat in the chair for like five whole minutes before I called it and got back in bed, which involved reversing the getting-up process I’d worked out.

After that, I did manage to eat about a third of the dinner they brought me, and about 10, a kind tech brought me some juice and graham crackers and took away the pot roast stench. Feeling very accomplished and having made it out of bed and to the bathroom all by myself again, I settled in with my crackers and logged into my hospital app and read my surgical notes. I remember those couple of hours as incredibly peaceful. The floor was quiet, no one was poking at me, I finally felt decent, and I had a view of the stars and moon outside. Probably it did not hurt that I was also on some pretty good pain meds. Around midnight, I fell asleep for real and stayed that way till morning, when I woke up very ready to take another little walk, move from the bed to the chair, eat a real breakfast, and make coherent conversation.

A potential small issue had arisen overnight, though. The right side, where the tumor had been and where they took the lymph nodes,had been putting out an awful lot of fluid. It was also somewhat more swollen. We didn’t know whether it would resolve or if it would turn out to be a hematoma that would require my surgeon to open that incision back up a few inches and wash out. Medically, I was on the bubble. The original plan had been for me to go home late morning or early afternoon if possible, but this minor complication shifted that a little. Staying in the hospital another night would have been totally justified because of the possible hematoma and the fluid output, even though it had decreased markedly beginning around dawn. However, like many plastic surgery offices, mine has an outpatient surgery center attached and if I did end up needing a wash-out, he could do it there if I didn’t stay. And, as I said, the fluid output had decreased to high normal. The surgeons left the decision up to me and I opted to go home, a decision I’ve never regretted. I’d told my partner to hold at home since we didn’t know what was happening. If I were going to stay, he could save his PTO, work the day, and come up around dinner again. At noon, he decided he wanted to see the situation for himself and headed up. By the time he got there, I was eating lunch and waiting on the discharge process to process.

By 2, we were on the way home, a journey that taught us a major lesson about which car to drive for all future surgeries. There’s this stretch of interstate that’s in terrible shape between the hospital and where we lived and riding over that bumpy road the day after surgery in my cute little Honda Fit was not pleasant at all. Also, though, another bit of physics came into play. Implants are filled with fluid. Fluid reacts differently to motion than does flesh. So every time he turned a corner or rounded a bend, the fluid in my boobs sloshed to the side. The first time, they took me with them because I wasn’t expecting it. It took months to get used to that new feature, partly because, after a few weeks we started adding more fluid and the slosh intensified anew every time. But on the trip home after that first surgery, we learned that his luxury sedan with the fancy seats and really good shocks was a much better chariot ride back from surgery.

Honestly, other than the pain from the sheet glitch and the nausea/vomiting from the anesthesia, neither of which is common, it wasn’t bad. It’s not really a thing I’d want to do again or something I’d volunteer for for fun, but it was okay. It was doable. A lot of us do have to do it and we mostly say the same thing: it was okay.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard and somewhat painful and frightening. It doesn’t mean it’s not a loss or that there aren’t a lot of conflicting emotions or that folks going through it don’t need physical, mental, and emotional support. It definitely doesn’t mean all those tests and visits and the surgery isn’t expensive – it is, even with good insurance. It damn sure doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be fighting harder for prevention so fewer of us need to do it at all.

It just means that, if mastectomy is something you’re facing, and you wonder if you can do it, the answer is yes. You absolutely can do it.